hen an old friend is run down by a speeding motorcar just outside the British Museum in London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle learns that a dangerous game is afoot. In his younger days, the crash victim led a secret society called The Arcanum, a group of intellectuals and mystics, including Doyle, who battled occult threats. Now, depressed over the death of his son in the Great War and unable to escape into writing, the creator of Sherlock Holmes all but dashes out of retirement to reactivate the Arcanum and avenge his mentor's death.
The search for answers takes him to New York City, where Doyle hopes to interest two long-dormant Arcanum members in assisting with the investigation. There he is disappointed to find Harry Houdini with no interest whatsoever in entangling himself with mystic events. Worse, H.P. Lovecraft is languishing in a cell at a mental hospital, accused of a series of murders that seem tied to the mystery Doyle is trying to solve.
It is clear that a fiend is stalking Manhattan's poorer neighborhoods, one who will do anything to keep the Arcanum from interfering with its killing spree. As the corpses pile up thick and fast, Doyle begins to fear that Lovecraft himself is in mortal danger. He must contemplate breaking his friend out of the asylum without no assistance at all—not even from
Lovecraft, for imprisonment has weakened his mind—and he'll have to do it fast, before the Arcanum's mysterious enemy can claim another victim.
The league of extraordinary celebrities
Doyle, Houdini, Lovecraft and Marie Laveau—author Thomas Wheeler pits this all-star quartet of historical celebrities against a dark Cthulhu-inspired menace in The Arcanum. The chief delight of the novel lies in its portrayal of two literary giants: in seeing Wheeler blend Doyle and Lovecraft with their own fictional creations. The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of The Arcanum is Sherlock Holmes with a ghostbusting twist. Equipped with all the famous sleuth's powers of observation and deduction but unfortunately stripped of his interesting weaknesses and eccentricities, Doyle both is and isn't Holmes. Lovecraft, meanwhile, is brilliant and sensitive. A half-mad freak with dozens of intriguing facets, he steals the spotlight from his stodgy English counterpart again and again.
Forced to share stage time with these two bravura creations, without the added interest of this blurring of the line between historical reality and fiction, Harry Houdini and the voodoo princess Marie Laveau cannot measure up. Laveau, in particular, hovers on the edge of being a token, sometimes functioning as a means of deepening Doyle's character (by giving him a past), periodically providing a bit of sex appeal or contributing to the story's various battles.
Steeped in Lovecraftian horror, the novel's plot is action-packed and structured like a feature film, with plenty of cinematic chase scenes and fights, measured doses of gore and a big special-effects finish. Its central mystery is simple but engaging, and its villains are convincingly scary. The Arcanum may be lacking in depth, but it is definitely worth checking out—by readers on the lookout for some light action-adventure or anyone interested in the book's key historical figures.
